I am currently an English professor at a highly-diverse junior college in New Jersey, and to paraphrase a certain meme now extant: if I had a nickel for every time a Puerto Rican student this semester decided to write their argumentative research paper about the reggaeton album Debí Tirar Más Fotos by Bad Bunny, well, I’d have two nickels, but it’s still wild that it’s happened twice.

As each student separately explained to me, Debí Tirar Más Fotos (literally: I Should Have Taken More Photos) is an album-length protest, recorded by one of Puerto Rico’s rising international Pop stars, against the imprecations of Act 60. Said Act was an attempt by the Puerto Rican territorial government in 2019 to revitalize the island’s battered economy in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the piss-poor Federal response under Trump, by offering hefty tax-breaks “intended to entice high net worth individuals and businesses to Puerto Rico,” in obvious hopes of getting them to invest in the local economy. The result has, predictably, been the rapid gentrification of the island entire, rendering large swaths of the territory unaffordable to the vast majority of the island’s poorer residents who have lived there for generations. There have already been mass protests organized against Act 60.

The album’s release date was also auspicious: January 6th, 2025, Three Kings Day–the twelfth day of Christmas and actual gift exchange date in Puerto Rico, in contravention of the hegemony of the Anglosphere over the region–not to mention the 157th anniversary of the Comité Revolucionario de Puerto Rico that led to the Grito de Lares against Spain that following September. This is very much a release date imbricated in the Puerto Rican independence movement and anti-colonial sentiment generally. I’m a Post-Colonialist by training, so my ears very much perked up at these revelations.

My ears also perked up because I served my mission in Puerto Rico over 20 years ago; the island is where I experienced some of my most sacred moments–the validity of which were all sorely tested when my mother died of cancer only two days after I got home in 2004 (as detailed in a certain book of mine I’ve promoted rather shamelessly). The island has always been bound up in some pretty complex and fraught feelings for me, to say the least.

As has the Puerto Rican real estate market, believe it or not: an uncle on mine, on my Mom’s side, first lost his fortune in Puerto Rico on a pair of failed real estate investments there in the 1990s. As I later learned for myself in the early-2000s, all the normal “rules” of real estate investment in the U.S. mainland (e.g. “location, location, location,” water-fronts and hill-tops should be more expensive, the very idea that properties are “investments” in the first place, etc.) simply do not exist in Puerto Rico. When I served there, it was common to behold people at all levels of society live in the same multi-generational household for their entire lives. There was no stigma against living with your parents or even your grandparents well into adulthood, no cultural pressure to hurry up and buy your “own” home or you have somehow failed as an individual, and houses in general are not treated as “investment properties” but places where people actually live.

I remember knocking doors of some of the humblest, most modest homes you’ve ever seen that sat right on the beach, or had million-dollar views from the mountain tops. The deciding factor on your home wasn’t whether you could “afford” the location, but only whether your gente were from there–people still very much belong to the land in Puerto Rico, a concept that we have long lost in North America. My Uncle, like so many Anglo-American investors before and after him, failed to comprehend these very core cultural differences–that just because Puerto Rico was U.S. soil, that didn’t mean it was like the U.S. at all. I’d always admired that about Puerto Rico, that even as they have remained stuck in limbo as a U.S. territory, even as so many of them learn English of necessity and serve in the U.S. military and move to Florida and New York and New Jersey, they nevertheless still resisted becoming Americans.

(The loss of my Uncle’s fortunes in Puerto Rico, by the way, also set him on the tragic road that ended his marriage and cost him his Church membership for adultery. Such in fact was why he and my Mom were estranged for six years, and only reconciled on her death-bed. Ten years he also took his own life; turns out he was never kidding when he said he wanted to follow the counsel of The Who and die before he got old.)

Hence to learn that the forces of gentrification and real estate investment had finally breached the beach-head of Puerto Rican land-values filled me melancholy and depression; it legitimately bummed me out. Yet such is why I also suddenly became interested in checking out Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, since it indicated that Puerto Ricans weren’t going down without a fight. So I concluded it was high-time I checked out my first new reggaeton album since I got home from my mission over 20 years ago.

What first struck me about Debí Tirar Más Fotos just on a musical level, in fact, was how familiar it sounded: it appears that reggaeton as a genre has not changed or advanced much since the early-2000s. But then, in fairness, neither has U.S. mainland Pop Music, either; to say, for example, that “Toxic” by Britney Spears would still be a hit if it had been released today is less a commentary on its supposed timeless appeal than on how little Pop in general has variegated since the Bush administration. Whereas near every decade of the twentieth century featured its own distinctive sound and musical sensibility—where the Big Band Swing of the ‘40s sounded completely different from the rockabilly of the ’50s, the psychedelia-and-MoTown ’60s, the AOR-and-Disco ’70s, the neon-and-synth infused ’80s, and the Grunge-and-Gangsta-Rap ’90s, the 21st century by contrast has largely stagnated into a long-standing rut, Pop-music wise. Plenty of good music there to choose from, to be sure, but nothing that has radically reinvented or overturned the pop-cultural landscape. More often than not, it’s all just either reviving or doubling-down of what has already come before.

But then, why pick on just Pop music? It’s not a novel insight to note that America entire has been stuck in a rut since Y2K, with no real vision or reinvention, but just an endless reviving and doubling-down of what has already come before–greed, corporate bailouts, anti-immigrant hatred, tax breaks for the rich, white-supremacism, police brutality, stagnant wages, gentrification, historical amnesia, etc., etc. One of Bad Bunny’s tracks, “Lo Que Pasó en Hawaii,” is a blunt reminder that everything happening to Puerto Rican residents now at the hands of unscrupulous land-developers already happened to indigenous Hawaiians over a half-century ago. It’s the same dull playbook, as predictable as it is oppressive, as perpetrated not on just these two island annexations of the Spanish-American War, but upon all of us, nationally, globally.

But I do not write all this to be hopeless or depressing. Because I checked out the Pitchfork rave review of Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and they mention as further context the recent “devastating” losses of the Puerto Rican independence party in November 2024. And I went and double-checked, and did see that the Independentistas came in second to the pro-statehood PPD party last November. But what I need to here emphasize this: when I was a missionary, the independence party had long been reduced to an insignificant blip on the Puerto Rican political map, a mere third-party protest vote. I had in fact written in a late-2010s journal article and book chapter that modern Puerto Rico has only “a polarized political climate split between the pro-U.S. PNP party, autonomous home-rule PPD party, a small and increasingly irrelevant cadre of independentistas.” But now I must update that assessment! The fact that the indepdendentistas had actually transformed back into a major second party legitimately pulling for an upset represents a fundamental seachange in Puerto Rican politics.

The book in which my article appeared argued that in Irish and Latin American literature, ghosts are presented not as terrifying horrors to be either exorcised and exterminated (as they typically are in English and Anglo-American fiction), but potential allies in anti-colonial resistance–because by denying the final reality of death, revenants and ghosts remove the final terror of the powerful to oppress us–as well as reveal how the revolutionary movements we thought were all long dead and gone can still come back from the dead.

Indeed, perhaps instead of me bemoaning how similar the music of this Bad Bunny album sounds to that of decades gone by–not just reggaeton, but Salsa, Merengue, and Latin folk-music are all represented across this album–it would be more accurate to say that Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos is participating in the revolutionary process of bringing back the dead, to join the Lord in coming as a swift witness against the workers of iniquity.